Thursday, June 3, 2010

In a letter to the president, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal complained about the administration's temporary moratorium of deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, but Jindal offered no solutions and assumed that the administration wasn't doing anything at all to remedy the situation.

But the context of the note to Obama is a peculiar one. For starters, an investigation into what went wrong with the current spill has yet to conclude -- meaning that the same technical problems could still pop up at other sites. Moreover, Jindal has been quite public and aggressive with his insistence that BP has been less than capable in managing the fallout of the spill it has caused. He made explicit calls for the "federal government to force BP to act responsible" and for the oil company to "either begin the work or get out of the way,"

But the oil company that Jindal (and others) are now demonizing would be overseeing a good chunk of the deepwater drilling that he wants put back online. Of the 33 permitted deepwater drilling rigs that Jindal wants to continue operating, two are under BP leases and two are operating under leases controlled jointly by BP and Devon, according to a federal official.

Regardless of hypocrisy, others joined in on Jindal's behalf, like Senator David Vitter, insisting that the administration was not acting urgently enough. Vitter, in his own note, attacked the moratorium and channeled the fear of oil jobs going overseas should rigs sit empty for months. This position has been echoed among conservatives, with oil being the topic of Sarah Palin's latest Facebook masterpiece.

This is a message to extreme “environmentalists” who hypocritically protest domestic energy production offshore and onshore. There is nothing “clean and green” about your efforts. Look, here’s the deal: when you lock up our land, you outsource jobs and opportunity away from America and into foreign countries that are making us beholden to them. Some of these countries don’t like America. Some of these countries don’t care for planet earth like we do – as evidenced by our stricter environmental standards.

The attack against environmentalists seem simple enough - they don't want oil drilling near the shore, so instead more dangerous drilling operations have to take out farther from the coast, resulting in disasters like this recent Gulf spill BP is dealing with right now. Oh yeah, apparently America now cares for the planet more so then foreign countries, and will be more environmentally safe then those who may potentially steal our jobs.

I just wanted to point out that BP stands for "British Petroleum," and as pointed out in the Sam Stein article, BP will be operating a large portion of the drilling rigs that Jindal wants permitted in the gulf, so it is safe to say that Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Rush Limbaugh, or whoever else wants deep water exploration to continue, are actually for giving jobs to foreign nations. Sure the laborers will be Americans, but the profits will go overseas.